It has been six years since we have seen the release of Street Fighter V in early 2016. While we will have to wait until 2023 to see the release of Street Fighter 6, FutureFive NZ was lucky enough to play a limited-time closed beta for the game.

Since this was a closed beta for Street Fighter 6, sadly there were no offline modes available at the time. I wasn’t able to check out Arcade mode, nor was I able to play a match with more Street Fighter-loving brothers on PS5.

Anyway, before you are even able to play the beta, you are required to connect your gaming profile to an active Capcom ID. This might be a certain requirement you will need if you want to play the full game too.

One thing I liked about the beta is that you were able to create your own character. This character will be used in the multiplayer lobby, but they will also be playable in the game’s open-world story mode.

Unlike some other games out there, the character creator in Street Fighter 6 is quite diverse. You’re able to create either a male or female character, plus you can give them all sorts of hairstyles and body types. I’ve seen other people create ugly monstrosities, and they look very humorous!

Another thing that I liked about the beta was the number of characters that you were able to choose from. The beta allowed you to play as Luke, Jamie, Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile, Kimberly, Juri, and Ken. Since I was familiar with their moves, I mainly played as the usual Ryu and Ken.

Although there wasn’t a New Zealand stage in the beta, you were able to play in six new levels. Graphically, Street Fighter 6 looks lovely compared to Street Fighter V, and I actually like the new designs for the classic characters.

In terms of gameplay, Street Fighter 6 plays much like any other Street Fighter game in the past. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because Street Fighter’s gameplay has been near-perfect ever since the release of Street Fighter II.

The only unfortunate thing about the beta was that there were no Oceania servers available. Due to this, I experienced major lag every time I got connected to a match. Sometimes I was disconnected from the entire beta completely!

Since this is a beta, let’s hope the online servers perform much better on our side of the world when the full game comes out early next year. Overall though, the beta shows that Street Fighter 6 is in safe hands. It should be as fun as the other games in the series.